The word 'critical" has three meanings which are dangerous, important, and disapproving. The purpose of this blog is to examine important or over-looked cultural, political, artistic, or historical issues of our time. Also, this blog is intended to be educational.

Wednesday, November 9, 2016

Welcome To American Fascism

The Republican Party’s
attempt to treat Donald Trump as a normal political candidate would be
laughable were it not so perilous to the republic. If only he would mouth the
party’s “conservative” principles, all would be well.

But of course the entire
Trump phenomenon has nothing to do with policy or ideology. It has nothing to
do with the Republican Party, either, except in its historic role as incubator
of this singular threat to our democracy. Trump has transcended the party that
produced him. His growing army of supporters no longer cares about the party.
Because it did not immediately and fully embrace Trump, because a dwindling
number of its political and intellectual leaders still resist him, the party is
regarded with suspicion and even hostility by his followers. Their allegiance
is to him and him alone.

And the source of
allegiance? We’re supposed to believe that Trump’s support stems from economic
stagnation or dislocation. Maybe some of it does. But what Trump offers his
followers are not economic remedies - his proposals change daily. What he
offers is an attitude, an aura of crude strength and machismo, a boasting
disrespect for the niceties of the democratic culture that he claims, and his
followers believe, has produced national weakness and incompetence. His
incoherent and contradictory utterances have one thing in common: They provoke
and play on feelings of resentment and disdain, intermingled with bits of fear,
hatred and anger. His public discourse consists of attacking or ridiculing a
wide range of “others” - Muslims, Hispanics, women, Chinese, Mexicans,
Europeans, Arabs, immigrants, refugees - whom he depicts either as threats or
as objects of derision. His program, such as it is, consists chiefly of promises
to get tough with foreigners and people of nonwhite complexion. He will deport
them, bar them, get them to knuckle under, make them pay up or make them shut
up.

That this tough-guy,
get-mad-and-get-even approach has gained him an increasingly large and
enthusiastic following has probably surprised Trump as much as anyone else.
Trump himself is simply and quite literally an egomaniac. But the phenomenon he
has created and now leads has become something larger than him, and something
far more dangerous.

Republican politicians
marvel at how he has “tapped into” a hitherto unknown swath of the voting
public. But what he has tapped into is what the founders most feared when they
established the democratic republic: the popular passions unleashed, the “mobocracy.”
Conservatives have been warning for decades about government suffocating
liberty. But here is the other threat to liberty that Alexis de Tocqueville and
the ancient philosophers warned about: that the people in a democracy, excited,
angry and unconstrained, might run roughshod over even the institutions created
to preserve their freedoms. As Alexander Hamilton watched the French Revolution
unfold, he feared in America what he saw play out in France - that the
unleashing of popular passions would lead not to greater democracy but to the
arrival of a tyrant, riding to power on the shoulders of the people.

This phenomenon has arisen
in other democratic and quasi-democratic countries over the past century, and
it has generally been called “fascism.” Fascist movements, too, had no coherent
ideology, no clear set of prescriptions for what ailed society. “National
socialism” was a bundle of contradictions, united chiefly by what, and who, it
opposed; fascism in Italy was anti-liberal, anti-democratic, anti-Marxist,
anti-capitalist and anti-clerical. Successful fascism was not about policies
but about the strongman, the leader (Il Duce, Der Führer), in whom could be
entrusted the fate of the nation. Whatever the problem, he could fix it.
Whatever the threat, internal or external, he could vanquish it, and it was
unnecessary for him to explain how. Today, there is Putinism, which also has
nothing to do with belief or policy but is about the tough man who
single-handedly defends his people against all threats, foreign and domestic.

To understand how such
movements take over a democracy, one only has to watch the Republican Party
today. These movements play on all the fears, vanities, ambitions and
insecurities that make up the human psyche. In democracies, at least for
politicians, the only thing that matters is what the voters say they want - vox
populi vox Dei. A mass political movement is thus a powerful and, to those
who would oppose it, frightening weapon. When controlled and directed by a
single leader, it can be aimed at whomever the leader chooses. If someone
criticizes or opposes the leader, it doesn’t matter how popular or admired that
person has been. He might be a famous war hero, but if the leader derides and
ridicules his heroism, the followers laugh and jeer. He might be the
highest-ranking elected guardian of the party’s most cherished principles. But
if he hesitates to support the leader, he faces political death.

In such an environment,
every political figure confronts a stark choice: Get right with the leader and
his mass following or get run over. The human race in such circumstances breaks
down into predictable categories - and democratic politicians are the most
predictable. There are those whose ambition leads them to jump on the
bandwagon. They praise the leader’s incoherent speeches as the beginning of
wisdom, hoping he will reward them with a plum post in the new order. There are
those who merely hope to survive. Their consciences won’t let them curry favor
so shamelessly, so they mumble their pledges of support, like the victims in
Stalin’s show trials, perhaps not realizing that the leader and his followers
will get them in the end anyway.

A great number will simply
kid themselves, refusing to admit that something very different from the usual politics
is afoot. Let the storm pass, they insist, and then we can pick up the pieces,
rebuild and get back to normal. Meanwhile, don’t alienate the leader’s mass
following. After all, they are voters and will need to be brought back into the
fold. As for Trump himself, let’s shape him, advise him, steer him in the right
direction and, not incidentally, save our political skins.

What these people do not or
will not see is that, once in power, Trump will owe them and their party
nothing. He will have ridden to power despite the party, catapulted into the
White House by a mass following devoted only to him. By then that following
will have grown dramatically. Less than 5 percent of eligible voters have
voted for Trump in the primaries. But when he won the election, his legions
will have comprised a majority of the nation. Imagine the power he would wield
then. In addition to all that comes from being the leader of a mass following,
he would also have the immense powers of the American presidency at his command:
the Justice Department, the FBI, the intelligence services, the military. Who
would dare to oppose him then? Certainly not a Republican Party that lay down
before him even when he was comparatively weak. And is a man like Trump, with
infinitely greater power in his hands, likely to become more humble, more
judicious, more generous, less vengeful than he is today, than he has been his
whole life? Does vast power un-corrupt?

This
is how fascism comes to America, not with jackboots and salutes (although there
have been salutes, and a whiff of violence) but with a television huckster,
a phony billionaire, a textbook egomaniac “tapping into” popular
resentments and insecurities, and with an entire national political party - out
of ambition or blind party loyalty, or simply out of fear - falling into line
behind him.